People who have a problem with The Beatles have a problem.
The first fab four may not be the Wright Brothers of modern pop music, but they
are the Henry Ford. They performed music that would influence all music henceforth.
Not only did the band evolve in the tradition sense of a band’s evolution (get
better at playing music, get better at writing songs, get better at recording
and producing an album, get better at being famous, get better at doing drugs
etc.) The Beatles evolved in the biological sense. Just as complex,
multicellular, warm-blooded and closed circulatory systemed mammals were once
tiny amoebae, The Beatles, who became a psychedelic rock band, who were some of
the first Westerners to diddle around in India, who became peace and love
hippies, once played (almost) run-of-the-mill, pop music for the radio.
Most importantly, and most interestingly, is that, at the
same time, they made a uniquely accessible music that almost everyone likes or
(at the very least) everyone at the time liked. When Mumford & Sons
recently had 6 songs chart in
the Billboard Hot 100, they accomplished something no other band had achieved
since The Beatles did the same in September of 1964. Of course The Beatles
dominance wasn’t really challenged. While none of the Mumford & Sons songs
cracked the top 50, four out of The Beatles’ six were in the top half of the
list. Not to mention that the group had fourteen songs in the Hot 100 earlier
that year in April. They were inventive and wildly ahead of their time even
while being fully embraced by contemporaries.
Thank god someone thought to record them, otherwise I would
have really missed out.
My favorite part about this song (besides its entirety) may
be imagining a crowd of people staring through a car window, wondering if those
spattered brains once belonged to a member of the House of Lords. Celebrity
culture has reached new heights, but it’s refreshing for a cynical 20 year old to
see that the human fascination with fame (specifically fame for fame’s sake) is
at least half of a century old. My generation isn’t the first, and won’t be the
last, to wonder aloud whether that guy was famous once and either dismissing or
diving headfirst into the story depending on the answer.
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